It always saddens me when teachers get so bogged down with administrivia that their focus gets drawn away from their students. That’s why I love sharing little time-saving tips! I see teachers get overwhelmed with email, so I hope this helps! You can “Select All” messages in Gmail by clicking the box circled in red below:

Additionally, you can select multiple messages at one time without having to select them all! You simply need to click the box by the first email you want to select, then hold down the shift key and select another message. All the messages in between will then be selected! This can be very helpful in deleting a string of “reply all” emails that you didn’t want to be a part of. Here’s how it works:

Inbox by Gmail is an app from Google that has seamlessly interplay with Gmail itself. For me personally, I prefer to use the Inbox app on my phone and prefer using Gmail when I’m working from a PC. There’s more than five, but here are some of the biggest reasons why I love the Inbox app!

#1) The visible preview of attachments with the Inbox app is INCREDIBLY helpful when I’m on my phone.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of what I see on my phone when I’m using the Gmail app versus the Inbox app:

#2) You can “snooze” your Gmail messages, have them disappear for awhile, and then reappear when you’re ready to deal with them later!

The only emails I leave in my Inbox are the ones that I know I still need to deal with; the rest get deleted or archived away. Sometimes, though, my Inbox can still get cluttered due to the volume of email I am dealing with, and there can be an email that sits at the bottom of my Inbox for a while because I don’t need to deal with it for a long time. In such a case, the snooze feature with the Inbox app can be particularly helpful!

#3) You can pin an email to the top of your Inbox.

If you’ve got a lot to juggle, sometimes being able to simply pin the most important email you haven’t had a chance to address to the top of your Inbox can be a useful way to stay organized.

#4) Set reminders so you don’t forget to respond to messages.

I am really, really forgetful. Like, “I feel really bad for my wife” kind of forgetful. Using organizational tools like Google Calendar, having key notifications set on my phone, and all using the reminder tool in Inbox helps me make sure that my forgetfulness doesn’t catch up to me professionally. We all need reminders sometimes, but some of us (like me) need them more than others.

#5) There’s a window of time after you click send where you can “undo” and retract the message!

Now that I’ve admitted my forgetfulness, I might as well go full mea culpa here and admit that sometimes I can be impulsive. I can get so excited to send an email that I don’t proofread first, or sometimes I immediately think, “Wait a minute… was I ready to send that?” after I’ve already clicked the send button! With Inbox I can click the undo button immediately after having that gut feeling. You’ve got be pretty quick though as you don’t get a very large frame of time before you’re out of luck. You can do this with Gmail too, but this is too important not to share!

You can quickly and easily add bulleted and numbered lists to your Gmail messages by pressing “Ctrl + Shift + 7” and “Control + Shift + 8”. Keyboard shortcuts like these can be a handy way to save a little time here and there! Yeah, this one isn’t a big deal, but sometimes it’s the little things, right?